Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech

In 2011, we have witnessed the incredible power of bloggers and social media users capturing the world’s attention through their activism. At the same time, regimes appear to be quickening the pace of their cat-and-mouse game with netizens, cracking down on speech through the use of surveillance, censorship, and the persecution and detention of bloggers. The increasingly the tech-savvy Syrian regime has been reported to demand login credentials from detainees, for example, while the use of torture in some of the region’s prisons continues.Aware of the threats to their safety, bloggers often devise contingency plans in the event they are detained.

In the not-so-aptly-named Democratic Republic of Congo, SMS was banned by the government last week in an attempt to maintain public order in the wake of contested elections that have left Kinshasa at a standstill. The country joins a growing list of nations, including Syria, Egypt, and Libya, that have cut off communications this year in an attempt to prevent unrest.

We've written before about Maikel Nabil Sanad and Alaa Abd El Fattah, two Egyptian bloggers under fire. Though their cases differ dramatically--Sanad was arrested for content written on his blog, while Abd El Fattah was charged in relation to his alleged involvement in the October 9 Maspero massacre--the two men have two things in common: both are being targeted for their opposition to military rule, and both--as civilians--have refused to recognize the right of a military court to try their cases.

Yesterday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) approved a Recommendation on Principles for Internet Policy Making. It contains a set of 14 principles intended as a blueprint guiding Internet policy development for its 34 member states. Many of these principles uphold core values we have long championed: fostering an open Internet, evidence-based policy-making, multi-stakeholder policy development, decentralized online decision-making, effective global privacy protections, and limiting Internet intermediary liability.

Last week, two leading Constitutional scholars offered detailed analyses of the Internet blacklist bills now pending in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect-IP, or PIPA. Both scholars concluded that the proposed law could not pass muster under the U.S. Constitution. So you’d think that the new version of SOPA circulated this week would have resolved those concerns.

You’d think wrong.While the revised SOPA briefly mentions the First Amendment, the substantive text makes clear that's just lip service.Here’s a selection of fundamental flaws that remain in both SOPA and PIPA: